• Question: what do you think of the development of robots

    Asked by its cool to Alan, Ciorsdaidh, Lauren, Leonie, Martin, Neil, Shuo on 8 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      I think it’s a great thing. We already use a lot of robots in chemistry to help with all sorts of tasks from measuring liquids, to screening libraries of molecules to look for new drugs, to changing samples in our NMR machine (it’s like an MRI scanner for molecules that lets you work out their structure).

      Here is a video of one of our NMR machines – his name is Hector:

      They're rather neat. pic.twitter.com/3MDDDrXGsw— Dr Neil (@theyakman) May 1, 2017

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      I think it’s a good idea… I takes away some really drudgery tasks… like loading samples into the Neil’s NMR spectrometer and so allow the instrument to run around the clock. No-one would want to stand there day-in-day-out putting samples into the machine. But this may mean in the longer term that jobs like that cease to exist and the people that did them will need to find new jobs. That’s one of the reason why we need to ensure everyone as a well educated as they possibly can be so that when this happens the people that are replaced by robots can find new jobs… Probably fixing the mistakes the robots make!

    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      I think it is an excellent thing! Robots can be more precise than will ever be. But remember a robot is only as clever as its operator 🙂 We have robots in our labs. One uses soundwaves to dispense a nanodrop (yes nano!!! you have litres, then you have mililiters, then you have microlitres and then nanolitres! – that small!) of material onto another surface…upside down!!! How cool!!! The robots also save us a lot of time as they are able to perform tasks faster and handle more material at once.

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Its only going to become more important going forwards. I am a little sad when robots replace people for jobs though.

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